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An Interview with Rebecca Mascull

Rebecca Mascull is the author of a gorgeous book set in late Victorian England called The Visitors. At its heart is the story of a deaf-blind girl, Adeliza Golding, and her appetite to know the world. Today I am thrilled to share some questions I asked Rebecca about her work along with her answers.

·I loved the story of Adeliza Golding, and I
wondered what inspired you to write about a deaf-blind girl.

There were two main influences in this regard: firstly, I
saw a TV movie about Helen Keller when I was young and was fascinated by the
moment when Helen learns her first word ‘water’. Secondly, I was lucky enough
to work with deaf students when teacher training in Bristol. It really opened
my eyes to the difficulties they faced accessing the curriculum in English,
when their first language may well have been British Sign Language. I was quite
ignorant about the different ways deaf people communicated, such as
lip-reading, Signed English, BSL etc. I shared a bus trip with one of the
students, James, and asked him lots of questions about what it was like to be
deaf, using a pad and paper. He gave me a wonderful insight into deafness. I
then wrote an essay on the subject and read ‘Seeing Voices’ by Oliver Sacks
about deafness – a marvellous book which suggests that the deaf brain is
inherently different from the hearing one. I was hooked on the whole subject
and it stayed with me all those years. When I came to choose my next project a
few years back, my interest in deafness resurfaced and then I knew I had my
subject. Then I wondered if I could ever attempt to write about deaf-blindness,
particularly in the first person. I knew it would be a huge challenge – to
approximate that experience of no sight and no hearing - but I like to take on
a challenge and knew it could have the makings of an unusual and fascinating
story.

·In the story Liza’s ‘blindisms’ are seen as
things she needs to work to eradicate and she wears a ribbon over her eyes to
avoid upsetting those who can see her. Does this come from your research or
your imagination?

This all comes from the research. My main focus was Laura
Bridgman – if you Google her you’ll find plenty of stuff. She was the first
deaf-blind child to be formally educated in America. She pre-dates Helen Keller
and was famous in her own lifetime. Charles Dickens even came to visit her at
the Perkins Institute in Boston where she lived. She was a very bright child
and learned to fingerspell, read and write incredibly quickly. A detailed
account of her education can be found in a marvellously obscure book by Mary
Swift Lamson, one of her tutors. I based Adeliza’s education and the chronology
of her progress almost precisely on Laura’s own. So, if anyone doubts the speed
of Liza’s education, there is real-life precedent! I discovered that Laura was
subject to regular appearances, where she had to meet interested members of the
public. She didn’t much like this, but it was used by the school to raise money
for the pupils, so one could argue it was necessary. She had to wear the ribbon
to shield her eyes and didn’t much like that either. She was also perpetually
scolded for her ‘blindisms’ and encouraged not to make ‘strange’ noises. Of
course, to her, these were not strange but entirely natural and she fought
against this. Interestingly, when I spoke with two brilliant Sense ladies who
work with deaf-blind adults and children currently, they both said how little
had changed in that respect: deaf-blind individuals are still treated with a
little disdain by uncomprehending and inexperienced onlookers in public when
they hear their sounds and watch their faces. It’s a subject that continues to
be one of debate today.

·Did you always plan to have a supernatural
element?

Not at first. The initial plan was to set the book in
America, post-Civil War. One day I had this image drift into my head of Liza
walking through a battlefield strewn with corpses and watching the souls of the
dead rise up, and only she could see them. I don’t know where it came from! I
later changed the setting to England, yet the ghost idea remained. I couldn’t
escape it and it just seemed to fit. I liked the idea of playing around with
perception, of the possibility that a different kind of mind might be open to
different levels of reality. Once I’d made the decision to include ghosts, I
had all sorts of fun deciding what kind of rules would govern their universe.
It was important to me that they did not take over the narrative, that Liza was
the driving force behind the plot, but that they played their part. I hope I
achieved the right balance there.

·Do you believe in ghosts, and have you seen one?

Ooh, that’s a good question. Well, no, I’ve never seen a
ghost, though I’d love to! I have always been drawn to ghostly tales and the
ideas behind them. I am a bit daft when it comes to superstition though, and
salute magpies and nonsense like that! And yet I’m also a great believer in
science and largely sceptical about many things, and quite a rational person
and a realist. My general feeling about a lot of the supernatural is that our
brain is incredibly complex and we generally know little about precisely how
consciousness works. So I do believe there are gaps there in how science
understands so-called supernatural occurrences, and that is a gap a novelist
can exploit and explore.

·I think there are lots of different sorts of
prisons in the book, illness or family expectations, as well as more literal
types of prison trap people. Yet The
Visitors is a very uplifting and hopeful story. It must have been difficult
to balance this, especially as you avoid an overly-neat ‘happily-ever-after’
ending. Was it something you were particularly aware of when structuring the
story? (Sorry this is a long rambling one!)

That’s a super question, very interesting. The original plan
was for Liza and Caleb to end up together, but once I was halfway through the
novel, it just became apparent that this was wrong, all wrong. I realised that
this was first love and that she had built him up into something he wasn’t.
They just would have made each other unhappy, I think. So I knew it wasn’t
going to be a traditionally happy ending, though I was hoping the reader would
agree with me that it was the right ending for the characters. I think you’re
absolutely right that the theme of imprisonment runs throughout the book – different
kinds of restrictions and expectations, often from the conventions of society
yet also from our own fears and regrets. In one way or another, all the
characters have to live within restrictions and find ways to escape them or
cope with them, even the Visitors themselves.

·I loved the description of eye surgery as it
felt very realistic. Was this type of operation common in the late nineteenth
century or is Liza something of a pioneer?

Lens removal as a cure for cataracts is a very ancient
practice. The main problem with eye operations in the ages before antibiotics
was the risk of post-operative infection. However, cataract operations were
carried out regularly in Victorian England and patients did survive and regain
their sight – I read a wonderful account of a real one in a Victorian
newspaper, and got the details from that of the instruments used, the medication
administered and so forth. I wanted to make sure I was absolutely accurate
about this, so I corresponded with an expert from the Royal College of
Ophthalmologists (who is mentioned in the Acknowledgements at the back of the
book) and asked him lots of awkward questions about Liza’s eye condition, the
eye surgery, her recovery and how her sight would be changed afterwards. He
also read all of the eye sections after I’d written them and checked the facts.
It’s important to me to get things right.

·I enjoyed and was intrigued by how the story
moved to encompass the Boer War. Was there a particular motivation for your
inclusion of this overlooked conflict?

It was largely chance that drove this. I knew that Lottie’s
brother was going to run away to war. But I hadn’t decided in the early stages
exactly when in the C19th the book would take place. I looked briefly at the
Crimea but I’d read ‘Master Georgie’ and didn’t want to do the same. I was also
restricted by the timing – I needed Liza to be educated at a time when there
had already been a deaf-blind child educated (i.e. post-Laura Bridgman) yet not
too modern, so that it would still have been early days in its history. So the
Crimea turned out to be too early anyway, and WWI would have been too late, so
the Boer War was the only major conflict that would fit with the correct time
period. Once I started to look into that war – something I knew very little
about – I found it an overlooked and compelling part of our history.

·I read in your acknowledgements that Golding,
and Adeliza Golding in particular, is a family name. Do you know much about
your hop-farming ancestors?

I don’t know much about the early Goldings. I did get caught
up in all those family tree websites for a while and managed to get back to
James Golding, who is mentioned in the Acknowledgements. I found a tithe record
that he farmed on hop land back in 1840 or thereabouts. And there is a famous
hop called the Golding hop, though I couldn’t find any particular connections
between our Goldings and the hop, though I like to imagine it! I also found a
child in our family who was listed in one census as an infant, then she had
disappeared by the next census. I looked into her and found she had died very
young. Her name was Adeliza Golding. It was such a beautiful name, I couldn’t
resist.

·Do you have a special writing routine?

It’s largely dictated by other responsibilities. Thus, I
write my novels between September and April, during the school day, between the
hours of 9.30 and 2.30! I have a daughter and also my partner works in a
school, so evenings, weekends and school holidays are busy. Also, I do exam
marking every summer from May through to the end of July, so I have to get
novels finished by then! It actually works very well for me, as I naturally
work better to deadlines. I begin researching a novel whenever I’m ready, and
do this mostly in any spare time I can grab – in the car waiting for my
daughter, in the bath! – but the writing I find needs to be done mostly in a
quiet and usually empty house during the day. It’s a routine that works for us.

·I know that your second book is in the making;
I’d love to know what it will be about!

Ah well, I can’t reveal too much, only because it’s still in
development. I’ve finished my final draft but it’s being looked at, so I can’t
talk too much about it! However, it is set in the C18th and is about a female
scientist. Once things have moved on a bit, I’ll get back to you and we can
talk more about it (as I suspect you like a good C18th novel)! What I can say
is that it was a great challenge to research the C18th and inhabit that world,
yet I loved every second of it and I’m quite sad to have left it! As for the next novel, I have a few ideas swimming
around in my head, but I’ve not decided yet. It’s too soon after the last one,
and I need a bit of a mental break to gather myself!

Thanks so much for your excellent questions.

***

Thank you to Rebecca, I really enjoyed finding out more about the background to the story, the writing process and the writer! And, as it is definitely true to say that I enjoy a good eighteenth century novel, I can't wait to read Rebecca's next book.

I hope this has whetted the appetite for The Visitors; if anyone needs anymore persuading then I will post my review of the book tomorrow. I also noticed that there is a preview of the first chapter available on the Waterstones website.

There's more from Rebecca on her website or you can follow her on Twitter (like me) or on Facebook:

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!